NewPages Reviews I’ll Drown My Book

Readers need not sneak behind the curtain to understand these methodologies; they are invited. The underpinnings are laid bare and made visible. “These are just studies too,” Jen Bervin announces. The works contained in this volume are places for writers to follow their obsessions to the end, but not necessarily to completion. The result is what Yedda Morrison calls “muddy tracks in an English garden.” Freed from concerns of finished form, contributors engage in what Bergvall describes as “games as source of perception and knowledge…. Bliss is the gaping shirt, writes Barthes.” Like Morrison’s text, which erases everything but scenery in selections from Heart of Darkness and the excerpts from Harryette Mullen’s S*PERM**K*T that pick at the ads and packaging in our daily lives, texts engage with the unknown and investigative. This unmapped territory is the natural space of poetry…